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WebCL: OpenCL For The Browser

Phoronix: WebCL: OpenCL For The Browser

First there was WebGL to bring OpenGL to the web-browser, and now there's WebCL to do the same for bringing OpenCL to the web. The Khronos Group is getting ready WebCL, to bring OpenCL to modern web browsers with JavaScript support. Early WebCL support is already available for the WebKit rendering engine...

It would actually be kind of cool. Upload a data set to your webbrowser and let it crunch away instead of having to install an application on your system first. Also I could also see distributed projects liking this as well. Open up your browser, navigate to a page, and bamm you have another client on the swarm crunching away.

It would actually be kind of cool. Upload a data set to your webbrowser and let it crunch away instead of having to install an application on your system first. Also I could also see distributed projects liking this as well. Open up your browser, navigate to a page, and bamm you have another client on the swarm crunching away.

No doubt about the coolness of this but... since it's totally unpredictable how long you stay on a site, i doubt that this useful for distributed computing. Not to mention that javascript is not a very efficient tool to do heavy number crunching, even with webcl.

This is really getting stupid.
Web browser has no business in dealing with complicated processor hungry tasks, and too much worry is being made over getting the processing off the processor onto the GPU. You know, with these big fast multi-core CPUs, you can whip off a lot of numbers... its what they're there for, USE THEM and quit worrying about GPUs.

No doubt about the coolness of this but... since it's totally unpredictable how long you stay on a site, i doubt that this useful for distributed computing. Not to mention that javascript is not a very efficient tool to do heavy number crunching, even with webcl.

The client versions of distributed computing that are not browser based have no way of knowing how long you keep crunching as well. Many people with desktops have their browsers open 24/7.

You can use OpenCL from within OpenGL to do different things - so I can see why you might want to have the same abilities within WebGL. I suspect it probably won't be used very much, though.

It could be cool to do some crowdsourcing with it. For example, put up an OpenCL algorithm in javascript on a webpage, and let a bunch of people hit it with different hardware. Serve up different versions, or even let them edit parameters in the javascript to find ideal splits based on what hardware you have. So i guess I can think of a few cool things to do with it.